A Druid Thurible

Through a life-long love of dancing and a long-term Yoga practice, I have become increasingly fascinated with movement as a form of meditation and prayer; I have also come to realise what a powerful tool meditative movement is in enabling a greater awareness not only of our life-force but also of our connection to the Divine.

In Druidry we understand this force as Nwyfre; in Yoga as Prana. What I find exciting is that we can connect to this energy in both stillness and movement. In Yoga, postures (Asana) and breathing exercises (Pranayama) are used to increase the presence and free flow of Prana/Nwyfre in the body. You don’t need to have practised Yoga for years to feel how this works – stop reading, take in a deep breath whilst having a good stretch and as you release these, notice how wonderful it feels and be aware of the sudden increase in energy flowing through you. This is Nwyfre. Mostly we ignore this feeling or pass over it quickly but the art of Yoga and other forms of meditative movement is to allow ourselves to become utterly absorbed in this process. In this act of focused fascination – of being totally present in our breath and movement – we come to strongly sense the reality of this energy; we learn to sense when it flows strongly and when it is depleted. Whether we approach the Light Body exercise from a place of stillness or movement actually doesn’t matter; the key is this focused awareness, being utterly present in each and every part of our body. In this vibrant state, we discover that the physical body is the gateway to our deeper selves and ultimately to the Divine.

When we engage with the body spiritually – with a loving and sensitive awareness and acceptance – we give ourselves the space to process things that might otherwise stay locked within us, perhaps sabotaging our attempts to grow. Through the many emotions and sensations that surface within our bodies daily, we are given the opportunity to learn a little more about ourselves and life. Sometimes these sensations and emotions can remain unprocessed and be stored in our bodies – particularly in the muscles – knots of tension that are the physical manifestation of a deeper psychological discomfort; these knots can limit the easy flow of Nwyfre in our systems. In using breath and movement – mindfully stretching and releasing – we help to clear physical and emotional channels, allowing the free movement of energy to flow through us more powerfully, strengthening and energising our whole beings. As we build a greater intimacy with our physical selves, we develop the potential to truly listen to what the body has to say. Both pain and rigidity or even pleasure and ease of movement, will tell us something important about where we find ourselves physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The more we listen to the body, the more we recognise the interconnectedness of these states within us.

In my own physical Yoga practice I use a mixture of individual asana and vinyasa. Vinyasa are flowing sequences of postures moving one into the other. These appeal to the dancer in me and illustrate most clearly the powerful links between meditation, prayer, worship and movement. The most well know vinyasa is popularly called Salute to the Sun, or Surya Namaskar to give its Sanskrit name. Sun Salutations honour something dear to all Druids’ hearts: the vitality, joy and life-giving energy of the Sacred Sun. When I fully open myself to the dynamic flow of this vinyasa, I feel that I give praise with my whole body and being, and in doing so, open myself up to the qualities that I am honouring. My body becomes an expression of the sun’s strength, energy and creativity; my body becomes a celebration of life. When the heat of movement and the focus of mind and breath merge in seamless flow, I feel that I am a body of light. It’s important to stress that some days I feel tired and achy, my body heavy and as far away from dynamic flow as it is possible to get! It is then that I can sink into the stillness to feel the gentle hum of that light; there is pleasure in contrast.

I currently feel increasingly inspired to experiment with my own vinyasa, with the understanding that these are invocations from the body, viewing their creation as a kind of spiritual choreography. This spiritual engagement with my body I have come to perceive as a form of Sacred Dance. Like all joys of the body, be it dance, sex, music or song, I truly believe that through deep and ecstatic engagement with our physical selves, we can find a path through to the Divine. Watch children when they dance in that wonderfully unselfconscious way – totally absorbed in the exhilaration of the moment. They seem to glow – it’s as if you can actually see their little light bodies! Some might think that meditative and ecstatic states are very different experiences but for me there is a rather nice paradox here: in movement we come to a place of peaceful stillness and balance; at the heart of that stillness and balance, we feel the unending dance of life coursing through us. Whether we surrender into the stillness or embody the flow, we open to something greater than ourselves.               

The beauty of a spirituality that embraces the body is that we are given the opportunity to truly appreciate what a profound privilege it is to be ‘embodied’. In joyful and mindful movement – with gravity our wise and loyal partner in the dance – we are both grounded and boundless; muscle and bone and radiant light.

Last weekend we saw the Red Deer herd out beyond Chale Green. Watching them from behind the hedge, one by one the hinds and their young raised their heads from grazing to look back at us. It is always a wonderful moment, finding yourself in a silent exchange with deer. There is a heightened stillness combined with a buzzing energy about these moments, all concerned held by an acute awareness and focus that makes time irrelevant; we become utterly mindful and present. The deer were silhouetted against the sea and it took a while for me to notice the large stag stood a little lower on the horizon. These creatures touch something deep and wordless in me.

The journey home brought several kestrel and buzzard sightings and before us, for the entire trip back, we were treated to the rising of the full moon, eerily vast as it surfaced from the summit of St Catherine’s Down, its softness sharpening to a hard white glow that stretched across the bay as we reached Luccombe.

The trees this autumn are the most extraordinary colours. They seem more intense than ever but perhaps this is because the memory of their intensity could never do justice to the reality and so each year seems more impressive than the last. Even my tiny little garden appears to be burning, the Acer and the Virginia Creeper so vibrant that I catch myself staring out the window countless times, instinctively drawing in the energy of those reds and oranges – my eyes eager for the lift it gives me.

Saturday, early evening, we ate at The Met, a tapas bar in Ventnor. It has the most amazing views of the sea, right on the esplanade, feet away from the ocean. It is a favourite place to watch the sea on windy days, the massive rollers powering in, so close at high tide. The skies over the sea are often dramatic and changeable and cormorants fly back and forth across the bay, skimming low across the surface, or sitting on the breakers, their wings stretched in worship. Another great plus is that coffee comes with a chocolate flake! What more could any girl want? – Lovely food, good coffee, chocolate, and the ocean!

After our meal, we stood in the dark watching the waves thundering in. The street lamps from the esplanade caught the white foam, giving the crests a luminous glow in the darkness, and the ocean looked vast and black and beautiful. In the sky above the harbour was Venus. Her brightness – just as the deer sighting from the previous weekend – cracked something open in me. Such a tiny but intense light in the darkness speaks simply and clearly to us all because, of course, it is such an obvious symbol of hope. Stars guide us; they keep us on course when navigation gets tricky. By their light we position ourselves and move forward, even when the terrain is too dark, vast and unknown to easily negotiate.

I have been feeling lost this year but feeling lost is not the same as being lost. In those moments with nature – when it touches upon that wordless place inside me – I know none of us are ever truly off course; we might be temporarily blinded or disorientated but this condition is so often a matter of perception, not of place or being. Philip Carr-Gomm, in his wonderful book The Druid Way, writes so beautifully and wisely about the paradoxical nature of journeying, of setting out upon a path and coming to find that the sense of movement (or lack of) we might feel is in many ways an illusion; wherever we find ourselves, lost or found, deep down, we are in the truest sense always home:

But death, like life, is full of paradoxes and although in one sense, on experiencing death of the body we begin a new stage of our journey, becoming a traveller in a wider brighter world, in another sense we may well discover that there is no journey – only a continuing revelation of the still centre – God/dess – the heart of Being. We uncover a great truth when we realise we are on a Journey through life. We uncover a great truth when we realise that there is no Journey.

The sight of Venus over a vast black ocean, spoke to me of that still centre, that place of Being. The fire of autumn reflects the intensity of love that life inspires, even at those moments when we shed all that we know, when we let ourselves fall and lay ourselves down that we might be worked in amongst the layers of our past; a past that can only feed and nourish us if we have the courage to let it go, let it become the foundation for something new.

No matter how chaotic and painful that transition might be for any one of us, if we can connect to that heart-knowing, that still centre – even if only for a second – we will be ok. I have had a kind of grit in my spiritual eye of late; feeling ill has been a challenge that has made staying connected to that still centre much tougher than at any other point in my life so far. However, I know that it is still there, I feel it in the gaze of deer and the light of stars, the dark, seething ocean and the leaves of autumn.

It can be a great comfort to perceive of oneself as part of an ongoing collective tale. We often rail against humanity’s potential to inflict cruelty, pain and suffering and yet I cannot help but feel compassion and admiration. It is remarkable to me that humans continue to live and love, often with passion and commitment, knowing that all they cherish will one day be taken from them. Never knowing the reason for, or meaning of, our existence, we are compelled only to live and accept the mystery, bearing the suffering (when it comes) with grace.

We are in this together. Our bonds of love, joy, pain and loss, and the wisdom that each of these brings us, rings like a clear, pure, infinite note through time; resonating in our cellular and ancestral memories, a baton of sound passed down and on, each of our experiences, deepening and enriching its tone. Our voice is added to the many, becoming a part of the complex and mysterious song of the universe; this song is ever unfolding and reshaping itself that its expression might be truer, more authentic, more itself. Such a perspective can develop an inspiring and enduring sense that our losses are never in vain, any more than our joys.

We do not have to wait until crisis hits to connect and draw strength from our spiritual sources. We can learn to feed and nourish ourselves at all moments, aware that we are emotionally collecting and storing materials that will help us access our resilience more easily and in doing so make the journey through any dark times ahead a little more bearable. These will not necessarily remove the pain but can ease the passage, encouraging us to place our trust in the notion that – in a world that is fuelled by the cycles of movement and change – all things pass.

A primary source for inspiration is found when we go outside, when we engage with the natural world, allowing ourselves to be open to its deep wisdom and nourishment. All that we could want to know about ourselves can be found reflected in the countless daily expressions of life.  

On the steep chalk slope of Culver Down on the Isle of Wight, on the heights looking out over the broad sands of White Cliff Bay, I sat beneath and amongst a vast gathering of swallows feeding upon the wing. Their numbers were countless; looking up through the frenetic twists and turns of their flight, I could discern yet more and more, those at the greatest height merely dots of black, humming particles, the air vibrating with their constant movement.

I had always assumed that like most birds that migrate, swallows increase their feeding just prior to their journey, building up their body weight in order to cope with the arduous demands that face them. Apparently not – feasting entirely on flying insects, they will nourish themselves on the wing, covering 200 miles in a day of what will become a 6,000 mile journey.

I had always thought that the taking on of extra nourishment before such an incredibly tough challenge was a rather helpful metaphor for our own descent into winter/crisis, advising a psychological storing and gathering for tougher times. Learning that these wonderfully joyful creatures do not in fact ‘bulk up’, led to a shift in my thinking. What if, when we find ourselves facing times of trouble or difficulty, we also find that our inner stores are low or near empty? What if we haven’t prepared for the descent into darkness and cold? How would we survive what appears to be an impossible task?

This idea of feeding upon the wing – of taking in what we need throughout an ongoing challenge, seemed to me an equally poignant metaphor. So often when we are faced with loss, we simply don’t feel up to that challenge, our reserves seemingly depleted and inadequate. Like swallows, we have to place our trust in the hope that we will find what we need to make it through, constantly nourishing ourselves as best we can. The swallow’s migration remains arduous and dangerous, many starve and die, and yet many more eventually find themselves back in the warmth and abundance of their winter homes. Their migratory urge is a part of their life and being, deeply encoded within their DNA; the experience is not something that they can choose to avoid or embrace – it simply is. Loss’s presence in our lives is similarly inevitable. If we can stay present, moving through the ups and downs with compassion for ourselves, sensing when we need to feed ourselves physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, doing this as best we can given that we might feel utterly broken and incapable of going any further, we might eventually find that we too find ourselves once more ‘at home’ within ourselves and our lives.

Each swallow must beat it own wings to fly but their journeys are never performed alone. Thousands upon thousands fly together, bedding down in large roosts. All swallows will make their bi-annual pilgrimage of necessity, just as all humans will descend into loss and emerge into renewal; all swallows are designed to have great manoeuvrability and endurance; all humans are designed this way too. The swallows inspired me to want to write something about loss that recognised that our deeper engagement with nature was effectively a process of feeding upon the wing; that when we feel broken, nature speaks to us in ways that can aid our healing or support us through. They also made me want to write a spiritual exploration of loss that might say something about those bonds of experience that we share, acknowledging, honouring and giving thanks for them and our place in the greater story of living and dying, both human and in the wider world of nature. By recognising ourselves as vitally connected to the lives of those beings (both human and otherwise) that have gone, those that are, and those still to be, we gradually discover a deeper sense of compassion for our own trials and sorrows, and perhaps in the process, uncover something of the purpose and the meaning of loss and struggle in our lives. Following the thread backwards and forwards, we can perceive a little of the pattern, and this alone can help us to tap into our resilience and strength, aiding us to feel a little less alone when the tough times strike.